A member of the House Freedom Caucus is taking an unprecedented step to endorse the primary challenger fighting to unseat the ultra conservative group’s chair.

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) is endorsing John McGuire, a state senator who is in a highly watched race against Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), McGuire’s campaign first shared with POLITICO.

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RICHMOND, Virginia — Last summer, as Donald Trump surged and Ron DeSantis collapsed, the pleas were constant. Hardly a week went by when wealthy Republican donors, a Rupert Murdoch-owned outlet or both wouldn’t send a flare up over Virginia’s capital in hopes Gov. Glenn Youngkin would make a late entry into the GOP presidential primary.

That was then.

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Former President Donald Trump has started vetting eight Republicans as potential vice presidential candidates — but that hasn’t stopped a number of other potential picks from trying to stay on his radar.

Their supporters are publicly lobbying for them. Some are going on television to directly appeal to Trump. One continues to be a MAGA faithful favorite. In another instance, donors are pushing Trump to pick their favored Republican.

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President Joe Biden ripped into the U.S. Supreme Court at a high-profile fundraiser in Los Angeles on Saturday night, calling Donald Trump’s ability to nominate more justices to the bench “one of the scariest parts” of a potential second Trump term.

Biden predicted that the “next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees,” and if Trump is elected, “he’s going to appoint two more [justices] flying flags upside down,” according to pooled reporters in the room. That’s a reference to Justice Samuel Alito, who has drawn backlash for two controversial flags flown at his homes.

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DETROIT — In a span of two hours Saturday, Donald Trump walked onto stages twice in this battleground state — once as pyrotechnics flashed around him before some 8,000 MAGA loyalists, and earlier, in a predominately Black church where he is still laboring to make gains.

For Trump, who is trying to rally base voters while also cutting into President Joe Biden’s support among people of color, the appearances at two different ends of the city — and with two starkly different demographics — illustrated the ground Trump still has to make up here.

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WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — Donald Trump marked his 78th birthday on Friday night by addressing a fawning crowd in Florida and repeatedly dismissing his opponent in November’s election, 81-year-old President Joe Biden, as too frail to handle a second term.

“Our country is being destroyed by incompetent people,” said Trump, who devoted large swathes of a jovial speech to poking fun at Biden. “All presidents should have aptitude tests.”

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In recent years, presidential debates have tended to veer off into theatrics and name-calling, creating captivating chaos and meme-worthy moments. But this year, CNN has put forward a plan to rein in any unruly behavior during its upcoming face-off between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

The cable network announced several steps it is taking to facilitate civil discourse at the candidates’ first meeting of the 2024 campaign — including muting mics to avoid interruptions between turns, nixing a studio audience and placing two commercial breaks in the 90-minute broadcast. These and other rules were agreed upon by both the Biden and Trump campaigns on Saturday ahead of the June 27 debate in Atlanta.

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz indicated strong support and confidence in U.S. President Joe Biden’s leadership amid mounting concerns about Biden’s mental acuity and the specter of former President Donald Trump’s return to office.

In an interview with Axel Springer media outlets on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy on Saturday, Scholz made assurances that Biden “knows exactly what he is doing,” and can provide critical leadership as the group of global leaders faces a complex web of issues, including multiple conflagrations and hotly-contested elections that threaten to upend the international status quo. POLITICO is owned by Axel Springer.

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DETROIT — When Donald Trump takes the stage in Detroit on Saturday, it will mark the second time in two weeks that he has headlined an event organized by Turning Point Action — a group known for its growing political heft as well as its pugilistic founder, Charlie Kirk.

It’s a longstanding partnership tying Trump to a lightning-rod commentator who’s made headlines this year for saying women in their 30s are “not at their prime” for dating, and volunteering that he now thinks twice about flying with Black pilots because of diversity, equity and inclusion targets.

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Rep. Jim Clyburn doesn’t believe the polls.

Despite a growing list of surveys that show Donald Trump gaining with Black voters, the longtime South Carolina Democrat and co-chair of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, dismissed suggestions Democrats should be concerned.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign is on financial life support.

Kennedy has been making headlines as one of the biggest third-party threats in a generation. Both parties have loudly warned that he could siphon away votes. But undermining all of this is his dire fundraising situation.

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FASANO, Italy — Joe Biden spent this week trying to persuade his closest world allies that American leadership would endure beyond November — and so would his transatlantic commitments.

But the expansive vision for the U.S. and its partners that the president laid out at the G7 summit here on the Italian coast is far from assured. The prospect of the return of former President Donald Trump, and the likelihood that he would immediately shred Biden's carefully laid plans, hung over everything.

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The Supreme Court has overturned a Trump administration rule that sought to ban so-called bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic rifles to be fired like fully automatic machine guns.

In a 6-3 decision Friday that split the justices along ideological lines, the court said the definition federal regulators sought to adopt went beyond the words Congress wrote into law nearly nine decades ago.

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Donald Trump on Thursday told Republicans to talk more about abortion. But earlier this week, at a gathering of staunchly anti-abortion Southern Baptists, Trump didn’t mention the word — opting instead to talk of defending “innocent life.”

The contrast is indicative of how Republicans have often struggled to find a coherent message on the issue — eager to placate their base without alienating the middle.

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PARIS — The French won’t love the comparison. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac — those proud French leaders of past days — might turn over in their marble tombs to hear it. But this country’s politics, its approach to the global economy and even believe it or not its foreign policy have all gone à l’américaine.

The unwitting godfather of this transformation is the currently beleaguered French President Emmanuel Macron.

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For Tucker Carlson, it has to be the ultimate good-news, bad-news moment: A major publishing house has canceled a prominent political journalist’s upcoming biography of the far-right media figure.

The good news, for Carlson partisans, is that the book in question — Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, by Jason Zengerle","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.amazon.com/Hated-All-Right-People-conservative-ebook/dp/B0CYHTV6H9","_id":"00000190-367e-d093-afdb-ffff5f4c0001","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000190-367e-d093-afdb-ffff5f4c0002","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}">Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, by Jason Zengerle — was likely to be a less-than-fawning look at the former Fox host’s journey from establishmentarian to conspiracy theorist.

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They mounted the stage in the dying of the light.

In the small town of Chapin, South Carolina, on the evening of Feb. 17, 2016, Nikki Haley, the nation’s youngest governor, and Sen. Marco Rubio, the youngest presidential candidate, had arrived in a bus emblazoned on its sides with “A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY.” “I wanted somebody that had conviction to do the right thing, but I wanted somebody humble enough that remembers that you work for all the people, and I wanted somebody that was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made for their children was coming to America,” the 44-year-old Indian American Haley told the crowd, formally endorsing the 44-year-old Cuban American Rubio. “She embodies for me,” Rubio said when he took the mic, “everything that I want the Republican Party and the conservative movement to be.”

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Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump delivered a campaign-style energy address during a day of meetings with congressional Republicans on Thursday, hitting on trademark themes like “drill baby drill” and pledging to reverse Biden administration policies he said hamper fossil fuel development and favor electric vehicles.

More than half a dozen lawmakers who spoke to POLITICO and described the pair of meetings — first with the House GOP and then with Senate Republicans — said Trump's remarks were light on policy details, and he did not directly address his interest in repealing the Inflation Reduction Act. He also did not indicate which of its sprawling clean energy tax incentives Republicans should target for repeal if the GOP wins control of the White House and Congress in November's election.

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